Jesse Waugh

“ During the symposium On beauty, neurobiologist Semir Zeki demonstrated that the human brain’s response to beauty is indeed contrastable with its response to ugliness, and that studies on the human brain prove that the medio orbitofrontal cortex of people of all types (race, gender, age, etc.) universally recognizes beauty in specific facial proportions and also gains pleasure from viewing art works which are commonly considered beautiful ”

“ How does beauty inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty? [29]
The writers of this pitch dance around their own relativity dogma like butterflies on fire. And then they go on to state "The Making Sense of Beauty conference seeks to explore these questions in an inclusive environment that welcomes participants from all disciplines, professions and vocations. ”

“ It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills, takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely and unexpected places of death and destruction.
Some find no beauty in life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more. ”

“ No, I don't think my assertions would be welcome at all, as they would only serve to threaten the entrenched and now fossilized counter-intuitive subjectivist dogma that Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and that there can never be any valid consensus which would prove otherwise – i.e., that there may be even the slightest something objective about Beauty. According to the new status quo, ugliness is only a relative form of Beauty ”

“ But something tells me that if I go to that conference and state my sincere belief that Beauty is objective and absolute, I will be crucified by relativists who only give the slightest lip-service to the possibility that the 20th century excommunication of Beauty might have been a giant, colossal mistake, and I will also be ostracized for behaving in any sort of an assertive, masculine manner, which behaviour will be seen as suspect and potentially dangerous. ”

“ Greek ideas of beauty have profoundly influenced Western art and how we think about ourselves today. This panel discussion will consider Greek perceptions of beauty, and how ideas have changed, from Greek sculpture's impact on art in the 19th century to recent neurological insights into how the brain generates experiences of beauty. ”